Confirmed: iPlayer App Coming To iPad, Android This Week

We already reported last month that the BBC’s iPlayer service would finally be released as an app before February’s end.

The BBC had scheduled a press conference for Friday morning to announce it. But BBC online engineer Geoff Marshall blew the surprise by tweeting about it on Monday.

Now the BBC has scrapped the press conference and confirmed by blog: “All things being well we plan to have Android and iPad apps in stores by the end of the week.” iPlayer already works on iOS via mobile web, but a native experience should be better.

To that end, there is no talk of downloading programmes to the devices – a mechanism that was iPlayer’s first incarnation, before streaming became more popular. Indeed, programme streams will work only over WiFi.